The developments described in this section are known to the inventors. However, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the developments described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section, or that those developments are known to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
Many modern workplaces are increasingly encouraging employee collaboration. Such collaboration relies on effective communication among co-workers. Various tools are available to assist with collaboration efforts, such as collaboration platforms that facilitate instant messaging (IM) between users, either as a complement to email or as its replacement. Instant messaging applications are also used by groups of people to enable communication for social purposes.
In order to increase functionality of collaboration platforms can be integrated with other systems or services by the use of integrations (also referred to as plug-ins or add-ons). For example, some collaboration platforms let users to subscribe to various third party applications or create their own proprietary applications to add into their groups.
The integrated applications/services may, amongst other things, be configured to contribute to chat rooms by pushing notifications and answer queries. For instance, whenever an event pertinent to the group occurs, the third party application may publish a message in the group's chat room. This can be useful when events occur occasionally or when the group subscribes to a few applications. However, when groups subscribe to multiple such integrations or when events occur more frequently, the number of messages received by users may quickly become overwhelming. This reduces the usefulness of the messages and, in fact, the instant messaging system as a whole as chat rooms can quickly become inundated with messages from both human and programmatic users.